


without you, things go hazy

by karygurl



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1940s through post-CA:TWS, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dissociation, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Blood, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reader works for Hydra against their will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:27:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23640814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karygurl/pseuds/karygurl
Summary: You grew up in your father’s shadow, helping him with schematics for his inventions. When he defected to Hydra, he took you with him and you were forced to work on their projects, including designing and maintaining an arm that you had no way of knowing would be used on someone else trapped within Hydra’s clutches.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader
Comments: 26
Kudos: 97





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [Hazy by Rosi Golan ft. William Fitzsimmons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe1-mg1cGjU).

Your childhood was largely uneventful. You were raised just outside of London, and your father was an engineer. You remembered working with him on many of his projects and inventions as you grew up, reading through his periodicals and magazines, and reveling in his praise and adoring when you could surprise him in finding ways to improve his designs. In 1940, when you were 16 years old, he stole away with you to travel across Europe through passenger trains and even train hopping to work in a secret underground bunker with a cabal of other scientists.

You had assumed he’d be helping the Allied forces.

You were wrong.

Your father was a smart man. Unfortunately, he was not a good one.

You didn’t actually know what country you were in; the views outside the bunker were of forest, and blanketed in white depending on the time of year. The majority of the other scientists spoke German, but there were some who only spoke Italian or Russian as well.

You’d had to learn German in a hurry, because they refused to speak English with you or translate their schematics. 

For the most part, at the beginning, your father simply asked for your help in improving his designs, as someone he could throw ideas around with. You were an anomaly in the bunker’s halls, the only young woman in a sea of men dedicated to their work. Your father was the only person willing to speak English with you, and in the lonely bunker, it was one of the few comforts you had. However, one day you’d made a comment about one of his plans in front of a colleague, who had eyed you suspiciously. Apparently you were wrong in your assumption that they didn’t speak English; they just refused to speak it with you.

After that exchange, however, you and your father were issued a challenge by one of the scientists: to build limbs for a robotic soldier. You were separated, kept in different rooms until your designs were finished, and it was the first time you’d not had him at your side since you’d arrived. Another scientist stopped by at scheduled intervals to bring plates of food and glasses of water and writing supplies, but you didn’t ask for his name. You didn’t bother to learn any of their names. Their faces were all pasty and gaunt and held nothing but disdain for you; they were all too alike to even tell apart.

It was terrifying. You kept your mind on your work because allowing your mind to wander at any moment might induce panic. So you worked.

A few days later, you were abruptly pulled out of the room you’d been holed away in. You were joined by your stone-faced father, who refused to look at you, and the both of you were marched through the compound’s halls. 

In the largest lab you’d seen, a short, slightly chubby man with a comb-over and round spectacles was working at his desk when you were forced to approach. Both sets of schematics were laid across his side table and you and your father were shoved to the fore, waiting.

The shorter man turned and asked, “What is this?” You were surprised that he spoke in English. 

A smattering of German erupted from a man behind you-- something about a new project? He addressed the man in front of you as Herr Doktor Zola. 

After nodding in acknowledgement, Doctor Zola took his time inspecting the drawings in front of him. You remained stationary but your eyes drifted to your father’s designs. It looked like he had created some kind of piston-driven model with ball joints and interchangeable hand accessories, such as a pincer claw or blunt cylinder, you assumed for breaking down a door. 

You spotted easily a dozen areas for improvement in the brief glance you got. It made you realize how much your father had come to depend on you for improving his ideas.

Yours, on the other hand, was more intricate: interlocking metal plates that could shift and adjust in hopefully a similar range of motion that a human’s musculature could. You hadn’t had time to bring the legs up to snuff--the hip connections were a major stumbling block-- but you were secretly proud of the way the arm had turned out. Turning radius on every joint close to perfect, bracing through the shoulder blade and pectoral area to allow for counterbalance and strength, and the plates themselves were designed to theoretically shift to allow for load balancing for different tasks.

The design required a power source, but you hadn’t been asked to design that, so you’d left it ambiguous. You hoped it meant that the design could never be used; there was no way for even a tiny fraction of the energy required to be stored in such a small area. 

After observing in silence for several long, silent minutes, Doctor Zola first tapped your father’s schematics. “This, is a battering ram on legs.” He then tapped your drawings. “This… is a weapon.” He looked up at you with a small, proud smile that made your stomach turn. “You have done well, fraulein.”

From behind you came a unified shout: “Hail Hydra!” 

You hadn’t heard that name before this day. You tried to hide the shudder of revulsion it brought to your mind.

You never saw your father again after that day. As he had taken you away from your mother and the rest of your family, he was then taken away himself, leaving you alone, off balance and with no closure in this strange world of scientists and schematics. 

Hydra’s creations were your life after that point.

Drawings were handed to you and you were expected to make progress or improvements. They only gave you pieces, fragments, and expected you to work miracles. Sometimes you managed to figure out what they were trying to accomplish. Other times, you were screamed at and berated until you screamed back and told them what _you_ needed to figure out what the hell they were trying to accomplish with their latest mystery. 

Luckily, you worked with scientists, not soldiers. The most they did was backhand you when they felt you were out of line.

Once you were presented with what looked like a barrel for something resembling a cannon, but there was no scale, just some kind of energy beam. It seemed to be for… you couldn’t quite figure it out. Teleportation? Maybe transporting troops by shooting them forward? In the equations on the page, delta-E was marked “infinite.” You assumed it must have been some kind of theoretical then; no energy in the universe was infinite. So you tinkered with the equations, and increased the volatility of the beam. Maybe Hydra could try to use the beam to teleport troops and vaporize them by accident.

You didn’t realize you’d helped adapt their technology to create energy blasters that destroyed troops and battlefields by the thousands.

As time dragged on in endless stops and starts, you were shuffled around to different compounds, perhaps different countries. You never took civilian transportation, and often you were blindfolded so you had no idea as to where you ended up. Always another room, another drafting table, another series of schematics to dissect and improve. Languages changed, a lot. Seemed to be more Russian than German anymore. Learning another new language and alphabet were stumbling blocks you fought to overcome as quickly as possible. 

The monotony of staring at schematics day in and day out for years was broken by none other than Doctor Zola himself. He looked older, but less nervous and so much more confident than he had years before. That scared you.

“It is good to see you again, fraulein. I have a special project for you, one I think you’ll recognize.”

He led you through the compound, two armed soldiers at your back. You’d never seen these halls before; they looked to be more like laboratories, or hospital rooms. The chill that radiated from the walls seemed to sink its hooks into your bones.

“Ah, here we are,” Doctor Zola said, as if he were taking you on a stroll. 

Inside the room was--a metal arm. Your eyes ignored the rest and were drawn to it immediately. _You knew that arm._ And now it was attached to a body, a human body, this poor man on a gurney with sunken eyes and pale skin and angry scars arcing across his chest where skin fused with metal--

“The soldier has caused some trouble,” Zola explained as he cautiously stepped closer, “but we’ve found the right dosage to keep him under control. You will be able to work on his arm without interruption.” 

Zola turned to you then, with what you imagined he thought was a fatherly smile on his face. “You designed this beautiful weapon. I want you to maintain it, improve it. It will be your masterpiece, as he is one of mine.” 

You stepped forward and wondered if this was the point where you should refuse, finally say no and be killed and be done with Hydra. You hated your work, you hated them all, you wanted it to be over. You’d done enough damage by clinging to life like you had and continuing to work for them. 

Morbid fascination won out for the moment, and your eyes swept over the metal arm to inspect it. Whoever had constructed the arm had done a spectacular job in following your design, channels and locks in place to allow freedom of movement, especially in the fingers. You almost wanted to touch it, manipulate it, but it felt wrong. It wasn’t some prototype, it was attached to a human now. It belonged to him, not you. 

Zola was turned away, looking at one of the screens, when the soldier on the table slowly opened his eyes. 

His pupils were blown wide at first, perhaps because of the drugs Zola had mentioned. His gaze shot across the ceiling, the room, before colliding with yours. That’s when you saw the emotions roiling behind those blue eyes: confusion, fear. Defiance. 

He wasn’t a willing volunteer. He was a prisoner, like you. Damn your heart, but you didn’t want to abandon him to them. 

You tried to swallow down the tightness in your throat. You mouthed _I’m sorry,_ your eyes never leaving his, hoping you conveyed some of the same emotions echoing inside of you. You don’t know whether he understood you or not, but his expression changed in response to you. He looked at you with something akin to _hope._

It broke your heart. You’d never managed to find a crack in Hydra’s armor and escape yourself, how could you possibly help him?

“Ah, it seems that our Sergeant Barnes is awake,” Zola said benignly from behind you, and you froze. He sounded mildly amused, as if a child had awoken before their nap was meant to be over. It solidified in your mind what you already knew: Zola was a monster who viewed humans as playthings.

Concentrating, you held onto the name he had spoken in your mind. This soldier had--HAS-- a name. You wouldn’t allow him to forget it. You’d heard Zola refer to others by their ranks in their native tongue. Did that mean this sergeant was English? American? A prisoner of war?

You watched in horror as out of the corner of your eye, Zola jammed a syringe into Barnes’s abdomen and violently depressed the plunger. Your gaze snapped to the man’s on the bed, and his eyes held yours until they closed. 

The rattle of a canvas toolbag pulled your attention toward where Zola placed it next to your feet. “There you are, fraulein. I suggest you get to work.” His fatherly tone hid the thin tone of a threat as he left the room. 

You choked on a deep inhale, holding onto the air in your lungs as you considered your options. There weren’t many. Suicide by refusing Hydra, or give in and continue their work. You hadn’t managed to find a way to escape yet, and you doubted you’d ever manage it on your own. But maybe, with a possible ally, there was a slim chance. Was it worth it?

From what little you knew, you guessed that Sergeant Barnes didn’t deserve to be here. Maybe you could find some way to help him at least. That was worth it.

First, you needed to know what was done to him. You murmured a soft apology to Barnes before reaching out to inspect him.

Though the interlocking plates held your interest, the connection of the arm to his body was the most crucial part, so you began there. You swallowed down the bile that rose in your throat as you recalled your original designs and how thoroughly they’d been followed as you gently pushed down on his pectoral muscle and felt the stiff underpinning beneath, how deep into his tissue and bones the metal must go in order to achieve enough counterbalance to leverage the arm properly. The pink scarring left behind was horrifying, but despite the odds, everything seemed to be healing together surprisingly well considering the sheer amount of alteration they’d done. 

You bent to pick up the tool bag, ignoring all of the saws and other implements that made you sick to think of using. You used a simple blunt spudger to pull one of the plates gently out of place, one of the thinner ones on the inside of his arm near the head of where his tricep would have been, and using one of the sharp scribing tools left to you, you inscribed “Sgt Barnes” into the metal before reinstalling it. You’d had enough of a hand in Hydra’s other experiments to know that their experiments weren’t allowed to have a sense of self, only a code name. You wanted to make sure Barnes didn’t forget who he was. 

Idly, it made you wonder who you were yourself, anymore. 

The next step was finding the power source. Without one, there was surely no way to lift the arm let alone adjust the fine motor control needed to utilize it. You knew there had to be one; somehow the arm and shoulder were lukewarm, not body temperature but not cold to the touch, either. Must be from whatever power source they’d come up with.

In your original schematic, you’d placed it in the deltoid, so that the weight wouldn’t disrupt the balance and it would power both shoulder and arm equally. You pulled over one of the mobile instrument tables in the room and used the spudger to pull more of the plates free, lining them up carefully on the table so that they could be replaced in the correct order later. Inside were more plates and cabling, and you continued to delicately open up the work and--

What was that?

It was blue. And it was _glowing._

It was only the size of a lighter, slotted into place and trapped inside a metal case with slim windows allowing its light to escape. 

The sheer brightness and intensity of the glow had your mind racing. What _was_ that? Suddenly a lot of the Hydra experiments you thought had been theoretical, with infinite power to drive them, became a lot more practical. The realization settled in your stomach like a lead weight. 

They had the power. And you’d helped them use it. 

You allowed yourself a shaky exhale, and then got back to work. You needed to understand it, how it worked, what it could do. If it truly could generate the amount of force that you’d played with in your abstract calculations, maybe it could get you both out of here.

“You certainly have improved your design,” Zola informed you. “The extra power you managed to extract from the power source allowed him to kill three of my scientists before we subdued him. Well done.”

Three Hydra scientists were killed? You felt no sympathy for them. You hoped that your soldier killed many more. 

Sometimes you were called in to do routine maintenance on Barnes’s arm, testing its functions and making sure it was in tune with its host.

Other times you were there to help repair it when it was damaged. What had caused the damage? No one ever told you. It disgusted you though it was no surprise that the damage to his arm always received treatment before many of the rest of his wounds. 

Sometimes you were expected to train new scientists on the arm’s inner workings. You gave them as little information as you could get away with.

The other scientists belittled you for your attachment to their subject. They attributed it to you being a woman, soft, unfit for Hydra's work. Zola’s apparent distant affection for you awarded you enough regard to continue to be kept, but not enough to gain respect among the others who worked here. You didn’t particularly care. You’d rather have a heart than not. 

You never got the chance to actually speak with Barnes. He was often unconscious or heavily drugged, or there were others left in the room. Regardless, you knew that the room’s camera was always on. You needed a way to communicate with him, if he was ever conscious around you. The camera in the room ruled out speech for certain, but after some problem solving, you taught yourself Morse code in the hopes that his training had taught it to him as well.

Weeks passed before you were able to test your theory. Barnes was awake and seemingly lucid, and another scientist was in the room but he seemed more interested in the monitors and paperwork than you. You turned your back toward the camera and tried to shield your movements by bending over the arm, while tucking a hand away to tap against his abdomen.

“I-M S-O-R-R-Y”

His eyes widened, snapped toward you then away to stare at nothing again. The metal hand partially hidden by you leaning across it tapped back against your torso.

“W-H-E-R-E”

“D-O-N-T K-N-O-W”

“P-R-I-S-O-N-E-R”

“C” _Yes._ You didn’t know many Morse code abbreviations, but you knew that one.

“U 2”

“C” _Yes._ It felt strange to refer to yourself as that; you weren’t the one strapped to a chair or bed. You knew that you’d rather be anywhere than here, though.

“E-S-C-A-P-E”

“N-O P-L-A-N”

“S-O-O-N”

Your eyes darted to the other scientist in the room, who was still tsking and going back through his printouts, and then you dared to meet Barnes’s gaze. You wanted to drown in the fierce, warm blue of his eyes. For once, he was the one giving you hope.

Then they started not just drugging him, but wiping his memories. Your hope didn't last.


	2. Chapter 2

You were consulted on the restraints for the chair on the memory-suppressing machine. They didn’t want to damage the soldier’s arm, but also wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t be able to lash out.

You under-engineered it, the first time. He managed to break free and kill several members of Hydra. You acted shocked, appalled, outraged, and sorted the specs out with the second revision. You could only get away with so much. The chair’s purpose and engineering scared you, made bile rise in your throat. A tiny hope inside of you hoped that it wouldn’t serve its purpose, that he would break out again. But he didn’t. 

It made you question again the fine line you walked, between helping Hydra and helping Barnes. Were you succeeding in any way at all, or were you simply failing at both?

Surprisingly, some days even after wiping him, he still recognized you. Other times, his eyes followed yours and refused to look away, but otherwise wouldn’t respond to you. Most often, however, he stared ahead in stillness. Empty.

Then one day, they led you not to a maintenance room, but to another lab that held cryostasis tubes. One held what you thought was Barnes, face nearly indiscernible beneath the ice, metal hand pressed against the small window of the tube.

You were informed that one of the other cryotubes was for you.

“Вы помогли создать Кулак Гидры,” _You helped create the Fist of Hydra,_ you were told. “Вы будете заморожены, пока не потребуется ремонт. Доктор Зола приказал, чтобы вы отвечали за все обслуживание и модернизацию руки, поэтому мы будем держать вас в подвешенном состоянии до тех пор, пока вам не понадобится ваш разум.” _You will be kept frozen until it requires repair. Doktar Zola has commanded that you be in charge of all maintenance and upgrades to the arm, so we will keep you suspended until your mind is needed._

At least the freezing process was quick. You barely had time for the adrenaline spike and your rocketing pulse to send you spiraling before you were unceremoniously shoved into one of the tubes, the cover closed and trapped you inside, and then the ice rose in your veins until everything went white.

When they unfroze you, they left you in a room with a bowl of some kind of porridge, some water, a stack of books and a thin blanket to shake off the cryo. 

It took hours before you shivered yourself free of the sharp ice needles embedded in your bones.

Barnes’s tube had been empty when they’d pulled you out. Where was he? Was he having any more luck shaking off the bone-shattering chill? 

You were informed that you had a week to research the advancements in technology you’d missed since you’d been frozen (how long had it been?) and perform maintenance and upgrades on the arm of “the Soldat” before you would be put back in cryostasis. 

One week of study and work, then back in the tube. Then you were being violently shaken awake by your own shivering, time having passed by without you, and the process began again.

Barnes was always awake when you worked on his arm now. With cryostasis and the memory wipes, it seemed that Hydra felt that they finally had him under control. They apparently felt secure enough to decorate him of all things, the garish red star now painted on his shoulder making you irrationally irritated. Playthings, you and he. They even left you to work on him alone; sometimes you wondered if they were secretly hoping that he’d kill you. 

Despite your apparent autonomy, you knew that there were always cameras trained on you. Barnes watched you as you moved around him, but didn’t engage with you. One thing you were certain to do, every time you awoke, was to place your back to the camera and quickly tap out “U” on the metal plate that you’d inscribed his name on-- two quick taps, one long, holding touch. A quick **.._** each time. The other was when your time was nearly up and you knew you were about to be escorted back to your cryo tube, you allowed yourself a brief moment of speaking to him. You always leaned over his ear while pretending to inspect the plates on his shoulder, your face pitched down away from the camera to keep them from reading your lips. “I’ll see you again.”

Realistically, you knew with the memory wipes, none of it would stick. Still, you had little enough hope anymore. You wanted it to be enough.

Maybe you were a little over-attached to a man who may or may not even recognize you. But when every other person whom you interacted with looked down on you and seemed to loathe your existence even as they kept you trapped there, Barnes was the only one you could be even a fraction of yourself around. Compassion was in very, very short supply, and even the near-imaginary crumbs you encountered from him were enough to keep you going. 

Perhaps it was pathetic to live for him. But you were living, and that was something.

Facilities changed over time even when your week-long ritual never varied; you didn’t even have the luxury of consciousness when you were transported to another location, anymore. You never knew which country or year you were in when you awoke. Zola made an occasional appearance, haggardness advancing each time you were unfrozen, until he no longer appeared at all. Once he’d disappeared from your limited scope of the world, the thinly veiled scorn from the other scientists turned to outright disdain. It seemed that his approval of you had actually kept them in line for a time, but no longer.

And still, time marched on.

Television broadcasts, integrated microchips, optical fiber, magnetic film storage, lasers, LEDs, inter-networking. You read about all of these in dry carbon copies of patents and the occasional consumer enthusiast magazine. Thankfully, most were in English; it seemed that the western world was outpacing the advancements of the Soviets. The publishing dates were your only record of time passing. 

A week was never enough time, but you tried to absorb all you could in that short span, and figure out how it could be used to improve Barnes's arm. Carbon fiber sheathing beneath the metal plating cut down on weight and increased the protection of the interior actuators. Fiber optics increased response time by magnitudes and expanded bandwidth to convey more information like temperature and pressure sensitivity. Gyroscopic counterbalances made for better movement compliance. New metal alloys increased the durability of the arm plating. When the plates were replaced, you made certain to replace the scratched engraving of Barnes's name as well. Wireless trackers were added at the other scientists’ insistence, but you made certain to hamstring their range. 

At first, you had doubts about upgrading the arm. Why equip Hydra with a more efficient weapon? Your doubts faded, at least slightly, when you reinforced in your mind _why_ you were still there. You were giving Barnes a better chance to come back alive from whatever hellish missions they sent him on. And that, at least, was worth it.

It was sometime after 1983; Hydra didn’t exactly give you a newspaper when you awoke, so all you had to go on were the dates of the latest patents they’d dug up for you to read. It was a poor way to follow the world's progress, but it was the only way you had.

Two days remained before they froze you again, and you were listlessly scanning the pile of documentation left for you when your cell’s door was slammed open. 

A hissed, “Ремонт. Приходить,” _Repairs. Come,_ was all you were told as the Hydra soldier sent to retrieve you grabbed your arm and forcibly led you to one of the mechanic-focused repair rooms in the facility. 

Barnes was seated on a table in the room, his arm plating charred along the outside of his bicep. 

You rushed forward on your own, ignoring the soldier who slammed the door shut as he left the room. “Are you all right?” you asked, not expecting an answer. 

Your eyes were focused on the damage and slowly, gently picking it apart to assess how bad it was, when you felt a soft series of taps on your thigh.

“O-K”

Your body froze and you held still for a long moment, not wanting to give yourself away. You kept your hands working on his mechanical arm, lips curling into a small smile for just a moment. You don’t know how he remembered, but you were grateful that he did.

“I’m glad,” you murmured as soft as you dared, popping off a piece of scarred metal plating to help cover your words. Thankfully, the damage seemed more cosmetic than internal, just a lot of scorching, and you were able to dislodge the damaged pieces and restore them at the sanding bench in the room. A bit of buffing, shaping and polishing and they were good as new. 

You gave Barnes another small smile as you returned to his side to finish repairing his arm, angling yourself a little more carefully to block the camera’s sightline this time. His gaze was heavier than before, barely meeting yours before sliding away. You wondered what caused the weight, though you could stand to guess. Whatever Hydra had used you for, no doubt he’d been used for worse.

You wanted to work slowly, just to spend more time in his presence. How long had it been since anyone had spoken to you outside of barking orders? Just as you were wondering what to say to him, he tapped against your thigh again. 

“E-S-C-A-P-E”

You responded by tapping against the back of his shoulder while you worked. “W-H-E-N”

“T-M-W”

Tomorrow. Already? You nodded, almost to yourself. You weren’t involved in his training or whatever they used him for, but you had a brain if nothing else. When you create a weapon, you use it to hurt people. On top of those skills, Barnes knew Hydra’s protocols and capabilities better than you did. If he had a plan, you would trust it. 

You reached for his shoulder again. “O-K”

You wanted to help. You weren’t quite sure what his plan was or what it involved, or what you could do that wouldn’t get in his way, but a few ideas began to take shape in your mind, things you could do to at least disable some of the base's systems. Your eyes darted behind you to the tools and equipment in the room and once you’d finished reassembling his arm, you spent a minute or two opening drawers and cabinets and assembling a small armful of items that you wanted to play with. Nothing wrong with being prepared, you figured. 

Moving back to Barnes’s side, you made a show of moving some of the items around next to his arm, as if you were planning something that had to do with him. At least the camera could work in your favor in this regard, if anyone was watching. 

“You’re up and running again.” You collected your small bundle of items, then leaned over Barnes’s shoulder and kept up your ritual. “I’ll see you again.” 

He didn’t meet your eyes, but you watched his lips relax and curl just slightly, just enough that you had an idea of what his smile might possibly look like. Before you pulled away, he tapped out one more message for you.

“C-U”

Tomorrow. 

When you left the room and the soldier stationed there froze at the bundle of random items in your arm, you explained, “Я создаю прототип,” _I’m building a prototype,_ with a dismissive huff. 

That seemed to be enough to at least allow you to continue back to your cell uninterrupted. You knew full well that they’d be watching you more carefully since you'd never brought anything back to your cell before, but you hoped you could assuage their fears while still working on a few things that could help. 

You created an “arm” out of PVC pipe first, so that anyone who came into your room would at least recognize that much and it would hopefully throw them off. The shorter end became one of your experiments, and you tucked battery contacts and the largest capacitor you could find inside of it, with two nails pushing outward from the pipe cap. To the longer pipe length, you added two nails that stuck outward, and you made sure to space them as close as you were able to 17.5 millimeters apart, the exact width of the space between the outlet prongs in the base. You left a bit of space around the nail heads inside of the pipe, and wrapped them both tightly with as much copper wire as you could fit to connect them. Between those, a heavy battery, and some wire cutters, that was all that you could conceive for your arsenal. Hopefully along with what Barnes had in store, it would be enough. That was, if your tools weren’t taken from you.

Sure enough, later on in the day a scientist flanked by two soldiers stormed into your room and demanded in Russian to know what you were working on. You played dumb and explained how you’d found that a magnet dropped through a pipe wrapped in wire slowed considerably, and that the electric resistance might be useful to study for the arm.

The scientist gave you a disgusted look and asked if you honestly thought you were the first to discover electromagnetism. Keeping your pride in check, you shook your head and tried to look ashamed. With a scoff, the scientist turned and told the soldiers to let you have your pathetic tinker toys. 

Perfect. 

The rest of the evening was spent paging through patents, though your mind was trying to map what little you’d seen of the compound in the past few days you’d been awake. It didn’t amount to much; you weren’t allowed to venture out, and the destinations you were escorted to were limited. 

You barely slept, and the next day passed in a blur of anticipation that had you nearly vibrating out of your skin. You played with your “prototype” by breaking it apart into its components, attached the heavy battery to the contacts of the shorter pipe, and made a sling for the battery so you could bring it along while leaving your hands free. The last task you could think of was to pull a chair over to beneath the security camera in your room, and pull down the slack in the wire from the ceiling to let it hang into the room. You didn’t disconnect anything just yet, and you quickly dropped down off your chair but left it in place, hoping that whoever was watching the feed wasn’t curious about you hiding in the corner out of sight for a short time. Then, back to reading patents, though the text and diagrams only swam before your eyes.

When your cell door was quietly swung open without preceding heavy footfalls to announce someone’s arrival, you knew it was Barnes. You leaped up and bolted for the camera cable, ripping it out from the back of the camera and then dropping to the floor to shove it straight into the wall outlet below. After a spectacular show of sparks, you darted to the table to grab your few tools just as his boots cleared the edge of the door. 

Heart hammering in your chest, you skidded to a stop in front of Barnes and nodded. “Ready. Cameras are out.”

You saw the slight crinkle at the corner of his eyes (amused? pleased?) before he turned for the hallway and talked as he moved. “All of them?” His voice was deep, softer than you’d expected but then again, he probably wasn’t allowed to speak much.

“Whichever cameras attached to the same control box as that one, I’m assuming this entire wing but I can’t be sure.” 

“Copy. Stay behind me.”

He walked with purpose, balancing stealth and speed, and you tried to keep up in both departments while your hands were tightly gripping your makeshift tools. He moved through security doors effortlessly, sliding a card and stepping through each one without resistance before holding it open just long enough for you to pass through. Did Hydra's Soldat have clearance to wander the base? Or had he stolen it from someone else? Not that you minded the latter.

A sudden red light and blaring siren in the hallway had you both instantly bolting for the next door ahead of you. As he stopped to swipe his card, you asked, “Would darkness help?”

“Yes.”

“On it.” You quickly grabbed your longer pipe and lined up the two nails with an outlet on the wall of the hallway, stood back and then gave it a swift kick to embed the nails in the socket.

The ear-splitting pop was impressive, and the lights went out as the breaker in that area was blown. You wrenched the pipe back out and followed after Barnes into the darkness. At least with the breaker tripped, the blaring alarm had died with it.

You couldn’t see much in the darkness, and it was even worse when you heard people pouring out of a room somewhere ahead of you down the hall, footsteps too syncopated to be scientists. Soldiers. You sank down against the wall out of the way, fingers clutched tightly to the smaller pipe that was wired to the battery hanging at your waist. Last line of defense.

Grunts. Impacts. A few stray gunshots. Then it was over, and after a few of the longest seconds in your life, a metal hand grasped yours and pulled you to your feet. Thank goodness Barnes had used his mechanical appendage, you might have panicked otherwise. At least it was identifiable even in the darkness. You dragged your feet a bit as you moved, trying not to trip over the incapacitated bodies in the dark.

You used your long pipe with nails to blow out a few more breakers as you made your way out of the compound, and you left it behind when the aggressive sparking had finally blown the end of the pipe to pieces. 

Barnes took care of any resistance you encountered. You did your best to stay out of the way and not become a liability, though there was a moment when you got to use your pipe taser and shock the hell out of one of the soldiers who came close but hadn’t yet noticed you. You couldn’t resist giving his twitching form a swift kick before you hurried after Barnes again. 

Once you arrived in some kind of garage, Barnes headed directly for a black boxy truck and you bolted for the passenger’s side. 

His hands were wrist deep in the steering column and within less than a minute, the engine was rumbling away. “Stay down,” he warned and gunned the truck toward the tall oversized door for the garage. 

You covered your head and ducked low in your seat as the truck tore through the metal and emerged outside, the last remnants of twilight giving way to a darkened sky.

Barnes kept the accelerator jammed to the floor. You were rattling around in the cab from the rough road, but you didn’t dare speak. The headlights were off and it seemed as if you were hurtling into the abyss, so you followed his advice and kept your head down, bracing it against your legs. Long minutes passed, then longer still. You tried to keep breathing, slow and steady, to get your heart rate under control. The adrenaline spike was unreal and your mind wouldn’t stop racing.

You’d hoped that being outdoors would help, but it honestly didn’t. You’d spent so many years in bunkers, no windows, no access to the sky. You weren’t sure which was worse: the barely visible blackened silhouettes of trees rushing by, backlit by the gloaming, sky and treeline stretching on as far as the eye could see, or the deepening night, when you weren’t sure where the horizon ended or began and darkness expanded in every direction, limitless and swallowing you both whole.

You tried to keep quiet. You didn’t want to break his concentration, but questions and what-ifs were clawing their way through your mind in the rocky silence, so you tried to at least pick an important one. “Do they have aircraft?”

Barnes’s eyes didn’t leave the road, but he shook his head once. “Disabled them earlier.” 

You waited another minute, a chance to listen for any pursuers, before asking another question. “What’s the plan then?”

“Trade off vehicles at the first opportunity. Continue trading off until Krasnoyarsk. Then it’s a 76 hour drive to Hungary, though it’ll take longer if we have to cross borders on foot.”

You nodded, warmed slightly that he’d let you in on the plan now. Your eyes were drawn to the sky past the cracked windshield, and you watched the first of the night’s stars slowly wink into existence. “Hungary’s the plan, then. It has to be better than Hydra.” You hadn’t meant to speak the last bit out loud, but it fell from your lips all the same. You swallowed, trying to ignore the darkness outside the truck and focus on Barnes instead. “...Thank you.” 

Barnes nodded again and you finally lapsed into silence, the darkness swallowing your voice and eventually, your consciousness.

He woke you when you switched cars in the small hours of the morning, and you drifted off again shortly after. Later in the morning, you asked him to stop for food, but he told you that wasn’t a good idea. Russia was under rationing orders and you both would attract too much attention attempting to purchase anything. 

Idly you wondered how many times you would have been caught if you had attempted to escape on your own, if simply procuring food alone was a pitfall.

Thankfully, Barnes broke into a store later that night and obtained food and jackets for you both. Your Hydra uniform of black slacks and white button-up blouse was bland enough, but Barnes’s tactical outfit certainly stood out, so you were thankful for the small amount of civilian camouflage for him. 

The drive seemed to drag on forever, and a small part of you was happy for the nights that you switched cars if only for a change in the monotony. You had offered to help with driving, but Barnes refused. It was probably for the best; your driving skills were limited to a bit of joyriding in England back before the war, and while you knew the mechanics of a vehicle's operation, you didn’t have the muscle memory. In addition, your Russian was on the conversational side but not enough to get you both out of trouble, and you had to grudgingly admit that he was correct on that account too. You worried about his ability to stay awake, however. You were on your fourth day of travel and he had yet to sleep. He may be a super soldier, but any person functions better with more sleep than less. 

On the outskirts of Voronezh, he finally agreed to find a hotel, though that alone took several hours. His list of requirements was long, including several escape routes, good visibility, an end unit that shared a wall with only one other room instead of two, limited stairwell access to funnel potential incoming enemies, and access to cars that could be stolen in a hurry. 

Once you were finally holed up in a room, the thick curtains drawn to block any view into the room from the window, you weren’t sure what to do with yourself. Your eyes were drawn to the patterning on the walls. Wallpaper. It had been a long time since you’d seen anything but white or metal walls, and it struck you as so out of place and homey that you couldn’t help but want to run your hands over it. You resisted the temptation, however. You were almost afraid to move, as if one wrong step would bring Hydra down on your heads. 

Speaking of, there were a couple things you knew that needed to be taken care of sooner rather than later. Reaching up, you grabbed one of the metal curtain hooks to use as a makeshift tool and made sure the curtain was still covering the window before turning to Barnes. He was tuning a radio to a talk radio station so you wouldn’t be overheard. 

Once he was satisfied, you spoke quietly. “When you have a minute, I need to kill the transmitters in your arm.”

His eyes widened slightly in alarm and you raised your hands and spoke quickly to placate him. “I made sure that they're only effective within ten meters or so. I’m going to check to make sure Hydra didn’t add any other nasty surprises too, just in case.”

He nodded, and you pulled the room’s one wooden chair over and placed it next to the bed, raising your eyebrows at him in an invitation to sit.

He sat. 

The metal curtain hook was a crude tool, but worked well enough at leveraging the arm plating. You sat on the edge of the bed next to him and laid out the plates carefully in order as you removed them. The overhead light was a warm incandescent bulb, and working under the orange-hued light was starkly different than the cool fluorescent light fixtures you’d operated under for so long.

The primary radio transmitter was the first you removed. You tore it to pieces with your bare hands, not because you needed to, but because you wanted to. You tossed the mangled, deactivated pieces to the bed with a huff of triumph and then returned your attention to the partially dismantled arm. 

“They made me install these damn things,” you said in an attempt to explain. “I hamstrung their range as much as I could, and changed the frequencies too. Bastards. That’s what they get for forcing me to put that on you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The quiet hum of amusement in his tone made you freeze, and you almost missed the soft curl of his lips when he spoke. You smiled wider in return. How could you not? You were grateful that even after all they'd done to him, Barnes still held onto his personality, his humanity. It was a miracle.

When your eyes moved away from his expression, they followed the line of his hair that was now tucked behind his ear. His hair had grown longer, ending just above his jaw line. Idly you wondered how long he’d spent outside of cryo in comparison to you; how old were you both at this point? 

On your way to unveiling the second transmitter, you murmured, “I’ve been meaning to ask for years, and now’s finally my chance: is there anything I can adjust for you?”

His brow furrowed, eyes staring straight ahead. 

You tried to explain. “Anything I can adjust on your arm? The balance, if something’s too tight or not responding the way you want it to?”

His confused expression didn’t ease, but he finally shook his head.

“Well, you’re probably used to it how it is. If you think of anything, let me know, I want it to work right for you.”

Secondary transmitter in hand, you dismantled it a bit less viciously than the first, but no less thoroughly. Next up was searching for surprises. 

You followed the lines for the arm’s power, inspecting them to see if they were powering anything out of the ordinary, but nothing looked out of place. You checked every nook and cranny, inside his fingertips even, but didn’t see anything else of note. Thank goodness. 

As you began to slowly reassemble the plates, you found yourself wanting to speak, but uncertain of what to talk about first. Though there was no such thing as “safe” when it came to Hydra, this was the safest place you’d been so far, the most open you’d been able to be.

“Thank you,” slipped from your lips when you exhaled, and you inhaled deeply before continuing. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you ended up with… this.” Your fingers lingered on the inner workings of the metal arm, closing and reopening one of the actuators, before you turned and grabbed another piece to replace. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry that I ever designed it. I don’t even remember what Zola told my father and I to make back then, a ‘mechanical soldier’ or something like that. When they brought me into the room and I saw you for the first time, I couldn’t believe they’d actually…”

You lapsed into silence, the radio droning on in Russian and the click of the plates the only sounds in the room. 

“...What’s your name?” he asked, his voice barely a fraction louder than the radio.

You told him. He repeated it aloud; you weren’t sure how long it had been since someone called you by your name. Decades, probably, in or out of the ice.

“Is my name really Barnes?” was his next question. 

“As far as I know.” You picked up the arm plate piece inscribed with ‘Sgt Barnes’ and showed it to him. “You’ve seen this, right?”

He nodded, his eyes drawn to your scratched lettering. “I remember you pointing that piece out, when I came out of cryo.”

“I try to do that every time,” you said with a sad smile as you snapped it in place before grabbing another piece.

“How do you know that’s actually my name?”

You tried not to shiver, recalling the familiar way Zola had used the name, but you failed in repressing it. “Zola called you Sergeant Barnes, when I first saw you. I wanted to make sure you had a way to remember.” 

He nodded, eyes unfocused, looking somewhere far away. “Do they wipe you?”

“Me? No, just freeze me until they need me. They need what’s in my head for your arm, so I guess that’s too important to wipe.” Your fingers popped the last arm plate into place, and your thumb absently trailed along its edge. “Do you remember anything? I know they’ve been wiping your memories, but I wondered if there’s anything… or if things come back. I figure they must eventually come back, since they have to keep doing it.”

Barnes remained silent for a long moment, eyes ticking back and forth as if he were trying to assemble some semblance of memory. “The name isn’t familiar, but there’s… someone. A guy I followed into hell. I remember having to watch his back.” After a moment, he closed his eyes and shook his head, then turned to look at you. His eyes captured yours, and neither of you looked away. “And I don’t remember you, but… I know you.”

His gaze was focused solely on you, searching, perhaps trying to force a memory of you to form in his mind. It took you a long time to remember to breathe, and when you finally did, you tried to cover your choked inhale with a cough and a smile. “I’m glad. It’s a silly notion, but I didn’t… I wanted you to know that there was someone on your side. I knew the drugs made it hard to remember me, and then they started wiping your memory, so I wasn’t sure if it would even stick, but I’d hoped it would.”

He nodded, gaze falling away from yours, then he sat back and faced forward again.

You realized your thumb was still absently running along the edge of the last plate you installed on the inner elbow, and you pulled your hands into your lap. “A long time ago, you tried to tell me you’d figure out a plan for us to escape. You made me feel like I wasn’t alone there, either. I know you don’t remember, but, thank you. For both the hope and the actual rescue.” 

Barnes nodded again, slowly, his eyes still far away. 

You rocked backward then, leaning your hands into the hotel bed mattress, warm light from the overhead lamp and Russian chattering washing over you. It was so different from how you’d lived for so long that it didn’t seem real. You murmured quietly, almost to yourself, “I hope all of their nasty surprises are behind us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for bearing with the detailed descriptions here, it came from a night of shooting the breeze with an engineer friend and throwing ideas around, like how COULD you escape from a Hydra base? In the 1980s in Russia, it actually might not take as much as you'd think, though I still took a creative liberty or two. 
> 
> All Russian in this fic is courtesy of via Google Translate. Anyone who has any inkling of Russian, please feel free to laugh uproariously at the ridiculousness that I'm sure resulted :)


	3. Chapter 3

You and Barnes been on the run for almost two months now. It'd been harder than you both had anticipated; the communist countries that were more easily accessible to you were economically crashing, and migrating elsewhere was a logistical challenge and another chance at getting caught. Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland; no matter where you went, everywhere people were struggling. Barnes was debating whether you should both head to Finland, away from the collapsing Soviet Bloc, if you could do so without arousing suspicion. 

Even existing day to day was a challenge. Finding food when rationing was in effect and you didn’t have access to ration coupons meant Barnes had to steal for you both. He targeted Beryozka, Tuzex and Pewex stores aimed at visitors from the west, since they often had more goods available than shops for the common populace did. You weren’t sure where the guns and knives he’d taken to accumulating came from either, but you figured they weren’t bought with cash. If you both stayed in one place too long, sometimes locals would offer to have you over for dinner, or slip a little something extra into your hands with a smile. Just as often, there were suspicious looks, reminders that you stood out and didn't belong. So you kept moving. Finding space for you both to sleep without sparking suspicion was a hassle as well. Barnes’s nightmares were vicious, occasionally violent, and navigating the dilemma of waking him up without endangering yourself was a new skill you’d had to learn in a hurry.

At least time returned some of Barnes’s memories as well. He told you about them sometimes: fragments of stories about growing up in Brooklyn, the things his best friend would get up to, and some of the bizarre and hilarious stunts his war buddies pulled. As time passed he seemed more present, his gaze exploring your surroundings rather than absorbing them with a thousand-meter stare. Every day brought him closer to the man he’d always been, instead of the weapon Hydra meant for him to become, and you were grateful for every little breakthrough. 

For being in such close proximity now, touch was still foreign to you both. You were both used to you working on his left arm, but any other skin contact was startling. You wanted to fix that, so you started small with well-telegraphed fingers brushing gently against his intact arm. When he was driving, if he was amenable, you’d hold his hand, lacing your fingers together. When you woke him from a brewing nightmare, you touched your forehead to his for comfort.

It was slow, and it wasn’t always pretty, but it was progress. Things were getting better.

And then two days after you’d arrived on the outskirts of Bialystok in Poland, Hydra found you.

Barnes had found an old abandoned farmhouse that sat under power lines, maybe a hundred meters from the nearest road. Barnes didn’t like that it was so close to traffic, but the road was quiet and the tall grass surrounding the clearing would keep any movement in the lower levels of the barn out of sight for anyone who might be watching. 

You’d stepped outside the door into the tall grass in the early morning, just wanting a bit of sunlight on your face before hiding away again. You kept low, hunching forward awkwardly but wanting to keep out of sight, and moved a few meters away before sitting down and breathing in the breezy morning air. 

You kept your eyes on the road, looking out but not expecting to see anything. So when a black military truck rolled to a stop at the edge of the road, it took a moment for you to comprehend that there was no reason for it to stop unless it was there for _you_. 

You couldn’t make out much of the truck beyond the grass, but as you turned to creep back to the barn, a gritty, hollow ticking noise echoed in your ears and seemed to grow louder, more frequent as it slowly approached.

You had only a split second-- you scrambled toward the barn, abandoning your attempt at stealth and belting out, “Barnes!! Ru--!!” The end of the word came out in a pathetic wheeze as you were tackled to the ground, the heavy weight at your back driving the air from your lungs and face into the ground. Rough hands savagely ripped your hands behind your back to cuff them. 

“вот она,” _There she is_ , hissed a voice you didn’t recognize, and a strong yank on the hands behind your back pulled you up onto your knees. The Hydra soldiers surrounding you-- four of them, more fanning out in the grass-- all wore combat eye gear and masks in addition to their other tactical gear. You couldn’t tell which one had spoken. It didn’t matter who had spoken, really. In that moment, freedom had fled, and you were back in their clutches. Your one chance to flee had failed.

“Вы не думали, что вы единственный, кто вложил передатчики в наш актив?” _You didn’t think you were the only one putting transmitters in our asset, did you?_ This sneering voice came from your right. The soldier holding the ticking device in his hand (a Geiger counter, you recognized it now) was heading toward the barn as the device’s clicks grew more and more continuous. 

One of the soldiers behind you reached into your hair, grabbed a handful and wrenched your head back to look at the barn. “Вы можете быть домашним животным Золы, но вы ничто для нас. Теперь будь хорошей девочкой и скажи своему парню пойти с нами домой, да?” _You may be Zola’s pet but you’re nothing to the rest of us. Now be a good girl and tell your boyfriend to come home with us, yeah?_

Like hell. If he was the only one of the two of you to escape, he deserved that chance. He’d certainly have an easier time on the run than you. 

Then you heard a loud POP and your head was nearly yanked backward by the hand in your hair falling away. A barrage of clicks followed and every soldier in the field had their guns cocked and aimed, _at you._

You remained still, jaw tight and heart hammering in your chest. 

“Soldat,” one of the soldiers called out. “Ты пойдешь с нами.” _You will come with us._ Squealing tires sounded from behind you as presumably, another truck with another team of soldiers arrived. 

You didn’t dare look into the barn, or wherever Barnes had made the shot from. You kept your eyes forward, made one last attempt to communicate with him and mouthed the word, _go_.

The standstill dragged on in your head, each thundering pound of your pulse lasting what felt like hours as you watched the barrels of guns trained on you, terrified that one would flash and that would be it for you. 

You heard rustling from the barn, but apparently, not fast enough for one of the soldiers behind you. A soft whistling sound of moving metal preceded a sharp jab into your shoulder, and your mind exploded in pain. Your mouth opened but you didn’t know if you cried out; the knife felt like it had whacked the bone of your shoulder blade and your left arm was momentarily numb from the shock of it, your vision swimming.

Several bodies shifted in front of you, blocking your line of sight.

“Арестуйте его первым.” _Secure him first_.

You couldn’t see but you knew Barnes had come out of the barn. He was surrendering. _Damn him._ He should have run.

The soldier behind you tapped a finger on the grip of the knife in your back. “Хороший солдат, выполняющий приказы. Мы посмотрим, сможем ли мы найти какое-то применение для вашего **желания**.” _Good Soldat, following orders. We’ll see if we can find some use for your **longing.**_ He followed his taunt with an amused snort, as if he’d made some kind of joke. 

Barnes was marched past you, gun barrels from both teams now all trained on him, and you wished you could say one last thing to him. Anything. _I’m sorry. Thank you. I’ll see you again._ But then you were yanked to your feet, and the only sound you could produce was a pained cry that you tried to strangle in the back of your throat.

Once he was secured in the truck in front, you were shoved into the truck at the rear almost as an afterthought. Wedged between two soldiers who ignored you, you leaned forward to keep the knife in your back from hitting the back of the seat and doing more damage. 

You tried desperately not to move, to absorb any rocking of the truck with your legs and keep your shoulder from shifting in any way. You wondered if they were going to treat you, or just let you bleed out once Barnes was secure in their custody. Once they wiped him again… they wouldn’t need you. 

The drive felt like hours while you were in agony, but it was still the same morning when you were offloaded from the truck and shoved toward a warehouse door. Never far from Hydra, it seemed. Your eyes darted around, looking for the other truck, but it was nowhere to be found.

Inside the sterile halls, the echoing sound of screams were dying off as you were herded quickly to wherever they were taking you, and you immediately knew that those horrible sounds belonged to Barnes. They were wasting no time in ridding him of his memories again. Your heart broke at the sound of his screams, his memories taken away, the loss of everything he’d managed to scrape together of himself.

You were brought to a lab, several scientists eyeing you with disgust or apprehension as they moved to avoid you and the soldier leading you to your fate. Your eyes darted to the empty cryotubes awaiting occupants in the room, and the soldier behind you tsked playfully as one of the scientists started the cryofreezing sequence. 

“О, нет, окончательного прощания с тобой, котик. Они слишком заняты, вытирая тебя с его головы, и после этого у него есть условия для него. После того, как он снова станет нашим, я сомневаюсь, что они когда-нибудь снова разбудят вас после того, что вы потянули.” _Oh, no, no final goodbye for you, kotik. They’re too busy wiping you out of his head, and they have conditioning in store for him after that. After he’s ours again, I doubt they’ll ever bother wake you after what you pulled._

The knife was unceremoniously pulled from your shoulder blade, and the soldier all but shoved you into the tube and shut it around you. For the first time since before you could remember, you allowed yourself to cry. Agony, remorse, sorrow, empathy, they all washed over you… Then the warm torrent of blood flowing down your shoulder and tear tracks down your cheeks were quickly frozen in time, and your mind went white with nothingness. 

* * *

MISSION

Protect helicarrier launch at all costs.

Eliminate Steve Rogers on sight.

"A lot of people are gonna die, Buck."

...Buck?

MISSION.

"Drop it--!!"

MISSION.

“You know me.” 

“Your name... is James Buchanan Barnes.” 

**.._  
.._  
.._  
.._**

“Shut up!!” His mission-- all this _noise_ in his head-- he couldn’t-- 

MISSION.

“--with you ‘til the end of the line.”

…

MISSION FAILURE.

* * *

Time passed. 

The cracks widened. 

The Winter Soldier was gathering intel.

He’d gone back to the Hydra base beneath the Ideal Federal Savings Bank. He’d given the few remaining Hydra scientists a false mission report, and then eliminated them. Destroyed the chair. Raided the place for supplies and information then abandoned it.

There was something he wanted to look for, something needling him, but whatever it was, he didn’t find it there. So he went after another angle.

The man on the carrier, Steve Rogers… He’d said his name was James Buchanan Barnes. “Buck.” Bucky.

He’d told the truth. The Smithsonian exhibit confirmed it, as had the plate he’d pulled from his arm. How he’d known to remove that particular plate, he couldn’t remember. It made his fingers twitch.

There were a lot of pieces that floated, didn’t fit, so he got himself a notebook and started writing them all down, good and bad.

A wallpaper pattern. An old car that didn’t have tires, but floated off the ground. A radio program with… invading aliens, or something. Dinner with a family (his family?). Driving through the night with someone’s hand on his. Hauling a scrawny kid over his shoulder. A man with a bowler hat and a big grin shoving a mug of something at him. Endless, endless faces frozen in death.

Over time, the cracks split open and he filled in the gaps where he could. The wallpaper from from a hotel in Russia. Howard Stark’s flying car prototype. The radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. His sister Becca. Steve, who was somehow much smaller. Dum-Dum Dugan and the Howlies keeping him company. Names of mission objectives joined the faces. 

But there was another piece that just wouldn’t fill in. Something to do with Hydra. He was going to need help to track it down.

He knew where to find Steve--he made sure he knew where to find him--and that was… good. It helped, keeping an eye on him, knowing where Steve was. But it wasn’t quite right yet. There was something else missing, something that kept him pacing and on edge. Something else he needed to find.

In the end, he waited for Steve in his apartment. He knew Steve had been looking for him. Well, now here he was. While he waited for Steve to come home, he did a quick sweep for bugs and then a second sweep for anything that stood out. Piles of books, nearly everywhere, running the gamut from old hardcover reports of World War II through modern paperbacks on President Obama. Vinyl records and a turntable next to a Bluetooth speaker and charging cable. Artwork that had yet to be hung, or in the case of the sketchbook on his coffee table, yet to be finished. When he flipped through the first few pages, he didn’t recognize the depicted cityscapes but it brought to mind a flash of charcoal smudged fingers hanging over the wrought iron railing of a fire escape. 

He turned in place when he heard the front door open, purposely letting his boots scuff the floor. 

“...Bucky?”

The name Bucky was familiar enough by now from what he’d seen and his fragmented memories, even if it was still a little jarring to think of himself as that. “Hey Steve.” 

Steve closed the door behind him and hesitated before speaking again, probably trying to choose his words carefully. Dumbass didn’t need to bother; Bucky wasn’t going to run. “You remember me?” 

“Something like that.”

Steve took a step forward but his frown didn’t ease; he probably didn’t know how to take that. Hell, that made two of them then.

“Look,” Bucky continued. “It’s not all there, I’m still dredging up a lot of pieces. But I need your help finding something.”

That settled Steve’s resolve in an instant. His frown eased and he gave a sharp nod. “Of course, Buck. Whatever you need.”

Getting Steve’s help was easy, and he came with built-in back up. Decrypting the massive file dump from SHIELD wasn’t Steve or Bucky’s strong suit, so Steve got in touch with both Maria Hill and Natasha to help them out. Figuring out what they were even looking for was the hard part. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack… if there were hundreds of massive haystacks hidden around the world, and he didn’t even know if what he was looking for was a needle in the first place. 

Bucky tried to give them anything he could think of, picking at the edges of the charred holes in his head. Something to do with his arm. Something to do with Morse code. Something to do with a mission in the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s.

None of it helped. What saved the day was Natasha’s ability to read between the lines. After running down countless other leads, she’d noted a more than occasional sync-up in the cryofreezing patterns of the Winter Soldier and another Hydra project throughout the decades. No permanent name recorded, just a project number with occasional Russian descriptors that changed over the years: “Питомец золы” Zola’s Pet. “Обслуживание” Maintenance. “Гарантия” Insurance.

Last known location was at a Hydra facility in eastern Poland. Intel indicated that it was minimally staffed, mostly a storage facility for supplies and failed projects.

As much as he hated it, Bucky had couldn’t remember enough to confidently confirm, but something inside his head said _yes_ so he went with it. 

Within hours of confirmation, Natasha had mission parameters transmitted and Maria had a quinjet on the way.

Infiltrating a Hydra base with Steve Rogers came like second nature to Bucky the moment the jet touched down at a distance and they moved together toward their destination. He’d never seen Steve in a Hydra base before-- no, that wasn’t right. He’d raided countless Hydra bases with him in the war. The clash of memories was giving him whiplash, but his muscles and senses instinctively took over. Steve cut their path, Bucky watched everything else. Especially Steve’s six. 

Natasha’s intel was spot on, and the storage bunker was nearly empty. A hiding place for out of date experiments and a few displaced rats. Some guards, a handful of staff at most, were taken out and it was cleared. He always expected something (or several somethings) to go wrong but this went like clockwork. He almost felt let down. 

The layout wasn’t familiar to Bucky; he felt like he’d maybe been here before, but considering that so many Hydra bases looked like the same goddamned bunker, it was hard to say. He didn’t recall enough for it to have been one of the locations he was based out of, at least. 

So why was this place holding something that wouldn’t get out of his head?

After the facility was cleared top to bottom of Hydra staff and guards, Steve and Bucky made their way to the cryo lab in the east wing. Steve entered the room first, Bucky doing a last visual sweep of the hallway before following. Natasha was already in the room, typing at a terminal and intermittently flipping a few switches.

“Got the thaw sequence going for you,” she reported, eyes not looking away from the monitor as she spoke. With a final keystroke, she stood, raised her eyebrows quickly in a mock salute and slipped out of the room to head back to the quinjet and get it ready for takeoff.

Becky turned his eyes to the two metal cryostasis tubes further in the room. He watched them, just for a moment; he could feel the tension rise in his chest. If he never saw one of those damn things again, it’d be too soon. 

Steve was waiting patiently, watching the door to keep an eye on their exit. When Bucky finally moved toward stasis chambers, Steve approached with him.

The freezing cloud of rime on the inside of the thick glass window kept its contents shrouded until he was close. It was…

His gaze was pulled to your closed eyes first. Frosted eyelashes fanned against your cheeks, crystalline tears frozen in time as they fell. Somehow he knew the color of your eyes, even though they weren’t open. 

His eyes moved downward, trailing to your lips, and he could almost see them move. He had, before. 

_I’ll see you again._

He knew your voice, somehow. Who _were_ you?

When the thawing process finally finished, the red release button on the side of the chamber lit up and he hammered it with his fist and stood back. The lid slowly slid open and clouded his and Steve’s vision with freezing fog for a brief moment.

You choked in a shallow breath, then another, your lungs struggling to hold air as they thawed, body waking in slow stages. Your eyes opened slowly, blurry forms before you taking ages to take shape. One you didn’t recognize, but the other…

“...Barnes…?” you fought to speak past your thawing vocal chords, and you thought you saw him flinch. Of course he wouldn’t remember you. He was wiped again, obviously. Your mind was still sluggish, slowly adjusting to your body as it incrementally regained control. The pulsing warmth at your back was… what was that…?

Your gaze swung to the other man outside the tube. Blond, young, not dressed like a scientist. He looked concerned; that was certainly new. Hydra wasn't known for fostering people who cared. “Are you Hydra?” 

His head snapped back in revulsion, and he answered with calm disdain and certainty. “No, ma’am.”

The words “Oh thank goodness” tumbled from your lips in a rush and you tried to lift your leg to step out of the tube, but instead you tripped and pitched forward. Not-Hydra reached out to catch you.

At first you thought it was just clumsiness due to waking from cryo, but then pain shot up your left shoulder and arm as you fell. The warmth that had spread across your back began to leech what little strength you had. The lingering cryo effects and new grip of pain left you rigid and shaking, leaving you at the mercy of the man whose arms you’d fell into.

When you fell forward, Bucky’s eyes were drawn to the wide stain of blood left on the back of the cryostasis chamber, and its origin in your shoulder. “Steve…” 

Steve was already shifting you in his arms, lifting you while putting pressure on the wound. Your head lolled until he shifted to allow it to fall towards his chest. “I know. Take point, I’ve got her, Buck.”

They all but ran from the room, moving as fast as they dared without jostling or injuring you further. Steve tilted his head to the side to activate his comms unit in his ear. “Natasha, our pickup is wounded. How fast can you get us out of here?” 

“I can be ready in less than a minute. I’ll bring the jet right to the bunker. How bad is it?”

“Shoulder wound, lot of blood. Not a lot of damage, no exit wound so it’s either a lodged bullet or stab wound.”

They could both hear the sound of the scramjet engines firing up over the comms. “Well, if you want the best care and no chance of Hydra finding out, I can put us on a direct course for New York. Scramjet engines should get us there in time, and Doctor Cho’s at Avengers Tower right now.”

“Keeping tabs on Stark too?”

“He invited me over for drinks with Doctor Cho, actually. ...And yes, obviously I’m keeping tabs on Stark too.” 

True to her world, by the time they'd reached the nearest exit, Natasha was already there with the quinjet fired up and the ramp down and ready for them to head aboard. It snapped shut at their heels and she had them in the sky before Steve had even had a chance to set you down. He turned you carefully to lie you on your stomach; at least, you assumed so. Your vision was swimming, eyes only open for brief periods. You closed them to keep the dizziness at bay and squeezed them shut further when pain and shivers wracked you. The pressure on your back increased, sending a hiss flying from your lips as the ache in your shoulder washed over you with a new vengeance.

After another few bouts of fighting against waves of chills, pain and nausea that threatened to drag you under, your eyes blinked several times, trying to focus, before landing on Barnes. He watched you carefully and your dulled senses struggled to make out his expression. Was this another escape attempt? Some Hydra mission? Did he need you to be on your guard? You didn’t have much left in you, but you didn’t want to let him down.

They'd all been speaking English until now. So often you’d spoken English to each other while on the run to avoid being overheard; you hoped the opposite would do the trick now. Your tongue worked in your mouth, struggling to moisten it enough to speak. You tried to speak softly, only for him. “Мы в безопасности?” _Are we safe?_

You felt a prick on the back of your hand (an IV, or at least you hoped that's what it was) but ignored it and instead held onto Barnes’s gaze. His eyes widened slightly before he nodded. “Да. Ты должен отдохнуть.” _Yes. You should rest._

You could do that. 

At the peripherals of your fading vision, Not-Hydra looked worried, but you noticed the small smile on Barnes’ face that put him at ease just before you drifted into an uncomfortable darkness.


	4. Chapter 4

You grasped the feeling of awakening several times, but couldn’t hold onto consciousness for long before it slipped through your fingers. 

When you finally remained awake long enough to open your eyes, you sunk your mental hooks into cataloging the room around you. The ceilings were white but the walls were all glass. The view stretched outward, over rooms out in the open air at offset levels, and beyond, the crests of city buildings clustered densely together. 

A quiet, plodding beeping drew your gaze downward. You were lying back in some kind of medical chair, dressed in a new soft shirt and pants, with a wide metal band circling your body about a foot away from your chest. You couldn’t fathom its use, so you tried to find some clue. It was powered, obviously. There was a track on the inside, and along it, several powered housings with their lenses pointed inward. Laser technology? Was it medical or security related?

Your back felt a little stiff but surprisingly, there was no pain. You moved your arm a little, trying to test the limits of how much your shoulder had healed, and beyond a bit of pulling at the skin, it seemed to be fine. 

How long had you been unconscious? Was it time that had healed you, or technology? 

Through the glass, you could see Barnes and the blond man who’d been with him outside the cryostasis tubes walking in tandem down the hall, their eyes on you. Now that you had the chance to look, you saw that Barnes’s hair had grown down past his jawline, and he looked… good. More rested. Healthy. His companion’s lips were moving, and he clapped Barnes on the shoulder and stood with his back to you just outside the door while Barnes entered alone. When the door closed behind him, the glass walls went opaque and blocked out the outside world. 

Apparently you couldn’t hide the wonder in your expression, because Barnes’s lip curled at the sight of your gaping. He approached and stopped at the side of your chair, nodding toward the walls. “This is nothing. 2014’s got a hell of a lot of surprises.” 

2014\. Nearly thirty years, gone. You had a lot of catching up to do. 

Your eyes drifted back to the door. No doubt the place was monitored, but you wanted to ask anyway. “We’re safe here? Truly?”

Barnes nodded. “Long story, but they’re enemies of Hydra, actively trying to stomp them out. And one of them’s Steve, an old friend of mine. If we can trust anyone, it’s him.”

That must be the blond man outside the door. “Wait… ‘old’ friend? Did Hydra put him on ice too?”

Another tug at Barnes’s lips that widened his grin. You liked seeing him this open. You were glad that even being recaptured by Hydra and having his memories wiped again couldn’t changed who he was. “Something like that, but that’s another long story. What about you?”

You’d almost forgotten about your shoulder. You rolled it for effect, the twinge of the pull barely registering anymore. “Perfectly fine, honestly. I’m grateful for whatever they did. And you?” You tried to keep your tone light by swallowing back the thick feeling in your throat. “It’s been a while.”

He knew what you meant. He always did. His smile all but disappeared, his expression going slack. “Yeah. I don’t remember all of it, and most of what I do remember hasn’t been good.” 

“But you escaped. Didn’t even need my help this time.” When he didn’t seem eager to elaborate, your eyes fell to his left arm. Had Hydra bothered to maintain it with you out of the picture?

Your hand reached for his metal arm, and he lifted it for you without question. The metal loop attached to your chair that circled your chest was in your way, however, and before he reached you, instead his trajectory changed and unclipped whatever was holding it down and it spun across the chair and out of sight. You took the opportunity to push yourself upright and shift your legs over the side, shifting positions to sit sideways across the seat. 

Both of Barnes’s hands were held out, ready to catch you if you needed him, but once you were settled he relaxed and offered you his metal hand once again.

You gently pulled it into your grip, and over your head you could hear a sharp indrawn breath.

Barnes suddenly spoke your name with a heavy exhale, as if it’d been holed up inside his head waiting to be released. The sound was so startling that you nearly jumped. 

His brows drew together in silent apology. “Hydra didn’t keep any record of you beyond a useless project number. I knew your eyes, knew your voice but couldn’t remember your damn name.”

The naked relief in his voice made your heart squeeze in your chest. Your eyes darted down to his arm, and then back up to meet his. “Do you remember yours?”

“Yeah. You made sure of it, right?” He tapped his inner arm, over the plate with his name inscribed on the inside. “This was you?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Just pieces. Did some research and got most of the rest of the story, at least before Hydra got hold of me. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.” He gave a little shrug.

You reached out and thumbed the plate with his name on the inside. “Guess I should update this. Just in case.” Your hand fell to rest on the metal bicep, and you frowned in frustration. You could _feel_ the arm components grinding, the actuators struggling as they fired. Hydra had bothered to polished it, but the high-pitched whirring that sounded when the plates gently shifted set your teeth on edge. 

“Well if you’ll let me, I want to get this back in working order. I don’t know what the hell they were thinking letting it go this long without proper maintenance but I can already tell that the tolerances are way off, and you deserve better.” 

You lifted your head in defiance and were met by Barnes’s surprisingly tender gaze and an indelicate shrug. “Do whatever you want with it.”

Your brow furrowed. What did he think you were going to do, take it off? Or did he mean… You eyes drifted to the opaque walls before returning to his face. “What if someone here asks me about it? How it’s made?”

His expression remained nonplussed. “Tell them whatever you want. It’s always been yours.”

That caught you even further off guard. “What? No, it’s yours, and if I accidentally expose a weakness or a flaw in my logic that someone could exploit--”

He murmured your name, and that stopped you immediately. He offered you a wide, genuine grin. “Flesh and blood has weaknesses too. Not bulletproof, for starters. I don’t care what you tell them or don’t.” The metal arm slipped from your grasp and rose to your cheek, fingers lightly grazing your jaw before his thumb came to brush against the line of your bottom lip. “And yes, to me, this is yours. You just let me keep it.” 

Though your breath held in your chest, there was no tension between you both, only warmth. The fact that he didn’t treat his arm as a curse meant more to you than he could know. You mouthed the words _Thank you,_ the curve of your lip briefly brushing against the tip of his thumb. You’d intended to say it aloud, but your throat had decided that sound wasn’t necessary, and honestly, it wasn’t. He understood you.

His eyes snapped to the door, probably hearing something too quiet for you to register. Apparently it wasn’t too worrisome; his expression was still warm when his attention returned to you and his hand fell away. “You want to hide away in here or meet the goon squad?”

Your eyes drifted toward the door on their own. Spending time with Barnes made you feel safe in ways you’d only had glimpses of in your upside-down life so far, but your curiosity always got the better of you. From the soft crinkle at the corners of his eyes, he knew it, too. Steadying yourself, you pushed yourself off of the chair and your feet landed on the floor with at least a modicum of grace. “Lead the way. Any enemy of Hydra is a friend of mine.”

When he opened the door for you, the walls behind you flashed back to transparent glass, and two men who were quietly discussing something just outside the room stopped and turned to you. Barnes must have heard them talking a moment ago. One of them was the blond man who’d helped rescue you, Steve by the sound of it, and the other was a man with short dark hair and a goatee.

The blond stepped forward first, his smile kind. “Steve Rogers, ma’am. Feeling better I hope?”

You nodded, returning the smile and offering your name. You noticed that he hadn’t reach his hand out, and you were grateful. You weren’t quite comfortable touching other people yet. “Thank you for helping me stay in one piece.”

The man with dark hair stepped forward, wiggling his fingers at you in a little wave. “Tony Stark. You made this, correct?” He pointed at you, then Barnes’s arm, for emphasis. “You. Made this. We have _got_ to talk. C’mon, walk with me.”

Steve side-eyed Tony before turning to you again. “He’s our resident--”

“--genius billionaire scientist engineer playboy philanthropist,” Tony added helpfully.

Steve nodded, lips pulled together in a long-suffering way with just the hint of a smile behind them. You had the feeling this was a common thread with the two of them. “He’s taken an interest in Bucky’s arm and would like to discuss it, _if_ you’re up to it.” The last bit came out with a pointed look at Tony, almost a threat. 

Tony for his part held up his arms in an exaggerated shrug, then gave you a smile while waggling his eyebrows. It was so comical, you had to laugh and nod. “Sure, let’s walk and talk.” You shot a quick smile at Barnes to excuse yourself before moving to Tony’s side, who hopped forward and started striding down the hall. 

As he walked, Tony eyed you strangely, from several angles, before blowing out an exaggerated sigh. “Man, you need a nickname but I got nothing I can call you. I thought just dealing with Cap was bad, but now I’ve got three deep frozen experiments hanging around who have no knowledge of pop culture.” He clapped his hands together. “So, you’re gonna have to distract me with this arm. When did you come up with it again?”

“Sometime in the early 1940s. It’s been upgraded since then though, several times over.”

“What, did they just throw you in the ice box and thaw you every once in a while and hand over the latest issue of Popular Mechanics?”

“Actually that’s not far from…” You shook your head, mystified by the familiar name. “My father used to have a subscription… Is that periodical still in print?”

“Yes, but that’s beside the point. I have a feeling old magazines weren’t the only thing they were feeding you. What’s your background there?”

“Patents. Come to think of it, quite a few had the name Howard Stark on them. I’m assuming you’re related?”

He blew out a deep exhale. “Dear old Dad. Of course he’s still cropping up a couple decades after he died. He’s going to outlive me, I swear. So, what kind of upgrades we talking? I noticed the titanium alloy for the plates, nice choice.” 

“There’s carbon fiber to protect the inner housing. Also, upgraded control valves for the actuators for smoother motion and load transfer. Fiber optics for as much of the electrical signal as I could, though there’s still some copper through the joints.”

“You put glass in that thing? Decades ago even?”

“Everywhere I could. Copper’s throughput is too low. I didn’t want him to have a laggy arm, for goodness sake, it does him no good if it moves half a second after he tells it to. But I also couldn’t have it breaking whenever his joints twist or at the first sign of injury either, then he’d have a very heavy battering ram hanging off one side of him and it’d be good for little else.”

“Remind me to clue you in to multimodal glass for your optics, you’ll thank me later. And the power source?”

“That’s all Hydra. Something blue and weird.”

You were surprised that Tony _wasn’t_ surprised at that description. “That is both familiar and irritating.” 

“I’ll tell you all I know about it if you do me a favor.” 

“Ooh, favors, I like those, means I get to hold something over your head. Shoot.”

“I’ll ask for an easy one first: get that star off of his shoulder. He doesn’t belong to them anymore.”

“Well, sure, but that’s barely a favor, that’ll take a quick laser adjustment and ten seconds. Give me a good one.”

“Help me find any trackers on Barnes. I know for a fact there’s at least something radioactive involved, and I think there might be others else too.” 

“Already ahead of you. Spotted the radium when he first arrived. Wasn’t sure what it was for, but if it’s just for tracking, we can remove that.” At your frown, he gave a huff of a laugh. “It’s not strong enough for anyone to scan ninety floors up, and even then, I can’t imagine what kind of conflicting signals anyone would get trying to scan this place. That would be the least of your worries. I can take out the listening device too, it’s a cute little thing, reminds me of The Thing. No power, hard to detect, if a little primitive. Figures Russia would stick with the tried and true. ...You don’t know what that is. Okay, come on. Lab first, introduction to Google later.”

Your conversation with Tony was making your head spin, but not necessarily in a bad way. It was fast, almost syncopated in its rhythm, a whirlwind of ideas and speculation and _compliments_ of all things, and he was talking to you as an equal, like your contributions mattered. He was keeping you on your toes and even though you were swept along by him, your mind surprised you by keeping up and firing right back. You’d probably end up with a headache later but right now, you were seriously enjoying this. It was like having an honest to goodness colleague to work with, and talking to him made it abundantly clear how much you had missed by having to work by yourself for so long. 

Whisking you through the catwalks and stairwells of the upper floors, Tony jovially threw out, “I’m keeping her,” as you both walked past Steve.

Even meant as a joke, the thought of being held against your will again made your heart seize in your chest but Steve was already shooting Tony a stern look. “No, you’re not, Tony. She’s not being kept by anyone anymore. She’s your guest, not your prisoner.” His adamant response helped you suck in a deep breath and you shot Steve a small, grateful smile.

Tony gave Steve a flat look for a solid second before responding with, “So literal. Aye, aye, Capsicle.” Though his tone was flippant, Tony shot you a look with his lips rolled tight, a sign of sympathy. You suspected that’s as close as he got to an apology. “You stay as long as you like and leave when you like, all right there, Otter Pop? C’mon, let’s show you what the wide open world of the future looks like beyond the bores of dusty patents.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone interested in Soviet spying details, [The Thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_\(listening_device\)) actually exists! An unpowered spying device, super tricky. And since [spy dust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrophenyl_pentadienal) also exists, I figured it wasn't much of a leap to stick a chunk of radium into the Winter Soldier to help track down the asset further. Doesn't require power, keeps working indefinitely without upkeep. Devious.
> 
> I meant to break this story into four parts, but I can't seem to stop writing, so there's still one more left!


	5. Chapter 5

With the vast amount of engineering marvels at your fingertips at Avengers Tower, it took time for you to settle in, but even once you were comfortable, you couldn’t quite relax. There was so much to learn at least, and you enjoyed the hell out of soaking it up like a sponge. More than that, thankfully, being able to honestly talk and connect with people was what really gave you life. It had been so, so long since you’d been allowed that small connection with others, and it meant the world to you. 

Tony was brilliant, but beyond that, he honestly reminded you a little of your father. It struck a chord in you that left you uneasy, and you weren’t sure how to deal with it. Still, to work together with someone, and someone with such a black hole of a brain, was something you’d missed. He’d reveled in showing off to you, and on several occasions you’d had the opportunity to blindside him with a little knowledge of your own. There was something deeply fulfilling about watching Tony’s face freeze for a moment before he’d slowly smile and slowly, cheerfully shake a finger at you because you had something. It made you feel like even as far as the world had progressed past you, you might still have the skills to succeed in it.

Pepper Potts was both kind and efficient, reigning Tony in when he lost track of time batting ideas around with you and showboating his knowledge, and also helping you establish identification that linked you to the modern world. She insisted that the cell phone Tony wanted to set you up with had to go through her first, and though you weren’t sure what he might have done had she not insisted, you thanked her regardless.

Many of the Avengers, as the loose affiliation of teammates seemed to be called, only stopped in when the occasion called for their presence. They might live elsewhere, and missions took them away from the tower, but you still had a chance to meet them in their downtime.

Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff stopped in from time to time. Clint was easy to get to know, mellow and good-humored right off the bat, and Natasha, well, wasn’t. Frankly her professional, outwardly cool demeanor reminded you more than a little of your former Hydra coworkers. You knew she was assessing you for weaknesses and probably found you wanting. Thankfully, it only took one jab at Barnes in Russian under your breath to get her to laugh, and that was your in. 

Thor was… a shock. A literal god that seemed to have sprung from a storybook. Despite that, he greeted you warmly and treated you kindly, as an equal. Though his visits to the Avengers Tower were rare, he always called out your name as soon as he spotted you and came over to ask what you’d been up to. He had a way of making you feel like the only person in the world. 

Doctor Bruce Banner was often roped into your discussions with Tony the moment he arrived until the moment he left. He was kind as well, if not a little off beat, almost shy. Thankfully he sometimes had the wherewithal to stand up to Tony’s grandstanding, and also the generosity to try and explain some of his pop culture references too. His specialties were more physics and biochemistry, while you focused mainly on strictly hardware and engineering, but he’d managed to help your brain wrap around some new ways those fields intersected too.

Sam Wilson became one of your favorite people almost immediately. Listening to him and Barnes fire verbal shots back and forth was something that you could listen to all day. And yet Sam was so considerate and big-hearted when he spoke with you, always wanting to know how you were doing and if you wanted or needed to talk about anything. He seemed to understand your desperate need to connect with others more than anyone else, and there was a reason he was always at the top of your phone’s recent messages. 

Steve Rogers was a treasure. You knew Barnes must be the one he cared about the most, but he never treated you as if you were an outsider or a third wheel. He always made you feel welcome, made sure to check in on you in the lab to give you an out if you needed to make an escape from Tony, and made sure you were invited to any happenings big or small so you knew you were accepted and cared about. He treated you gently, almost to excess, but after being so confined and anxious about interacting with people for so long, it was a boon to have someone else shoulder that emotional weight. 

There was one time where you’d both been alone in one of the hallways of the tower, watching the shadows of the tall buildings of Manhattan shift in minute increments with the passing of the sun, when the conversation had taken a turn for the serious and you’d discussed a bit of what being in Hydra was like for you. You didn’t want to touch on Barnes; that was his story to tell. But Steve listened, truly listened to how it had been for you, and after you’d both lapsed into silence, he’d quietly asked if it would be all right if he hugged you. When you told him that you didn’t mind, he wrapped you up in his arms and tucked his head against your shoulder, quietly thanking you, thanking you for surviving and taking care of Bucky and holding on for so long. How a man who had no doubt been on the other end of Hydra weapons you’d helped create could still find so much compassion for you… It was a mystery. But you were grateful for him and his forgiving heart.

And then there was Barnes. You knew his full name now, knew that Steve called him Bucky, but when you'd asked him what he’d like you to call him, he’d simply shrugged and said whatever worked for you was fine. For the moment, he was still Barnes to you, but maybe you could get used to Bucky someday. 

You’d updated the plate on his arm to include his full name, as well as Steve’s and your own, just in case. Memory was a strange thing, and you never wanted him to have to search for too long again if he couldn’t remember.

The two of you passed the time together and apart, finding your own ways of reacclimating to a world that had left you both behind a long time ago. Most evenings you gravitated toward one another, especially if you hadn’t spent any time together during the day. Sometimes Steve joined you, though often it was just the two of you, decompressing and reconnecting. Where your new associates--friends--grounded you to the modern day and your new existence in it, Barnes was a link between your past and this new world that you found in many ways to be both mad and golden.

Despite the wonders at your fingertips, not everything was perfect. Hydra had left behind scars that ran deep in both of you.

Barnes still suffered from nightmares, just as he had when you’d been on the run together. You’d lost track of time one night, leaving Tony’s lab in the early hours of the morning, when you’d spotted him alone on a couch near the far windows overlooking the city. You’d nearly missed his hunched form, forearms resting on his knees, head bent low. 

You went to him, asked if you could join him. He’d nodded but hadn’t looked up, so you sat next to him on the couch, left thigh brushing his right, hoping your touch could offer a bit of comfort or grounding like it had in the past. How many years had it been for him though? How much did he even remember? Would it still help?

In the dim glow provided by the city lights below stretching out beyond the glass, you held out your hand, leaving it with your palm up on your thigh. An unspoken invitation. 

Moments passed. Slowly, quietly, he shifted his weight, moving his right hand to rest on the one you’d held out to him.

You covered it with your other hand, both thumbs gently running along the lines of his thumb, his palm, his fingers, the back of his hand. You took your time, hoping the sensation could pull him away from his nightmares. Slowly, slowly, slowly...

You inhaled deeply and came awake with a start. You’d fallen asleep, right there on the couch, and now the sun was stretching out over the city before you with Barnes still at your side. His head was tipped to the side, eyes closed, and you watched his chest rise and fall with the soft deep breathing of sleep. Your hands had come apart as you’d slept, though the back of your hand still rested against the side of his. 

You carefully extracted yourself, leaving him to his rest. He deserved it. 

It became a ritual, finding Barnes when he couldn’t sleep. JARVIS was quite informative, once you’d realized that the AI could help you. You asked to be woken up if Barnes ever left his room to go to that spot at night, and it (or he?) had agreed, “As long as you receive adequate rest in the interim, miss.” 

After that first night, you strategically left a blanket over the arm of the couch, and the next time you joined Barnes, you sat at the far end and patted your lap. His eyes flicked up to you before his head rose to follow, brow furrowed in confusion. 

“We’re going to fall asleep here anyway,” you surmised with a gentle smile. “Come on, put your head down, get comfortable.”

His confusion seemed to ebb into uncertainty, and you were about to ask if he’d rather not when he lay down on his side, facing away from you, his cheek resting on your thigh. Reaching forward carefully, you pulled his hair out of his face, then began to run your fingers through it. 

You remembered your mother doing this to you when you were little, so long ago. You swallowed down the lump that sprung into your throat from the old memories surfacing, and hoped that this would help Barnes as much as it helped your younger self. 

You watched the minute lines of his face relax and his eyes close at the repetitive motion of your fingertips brushing along his scalp, his hair sifting through your fingers. Once he’d settled, you reached for the blanket you’d stashed earlier and gave it a toss to cover him before returning to your ministrations.

True to your word, you did both end up falling asleep on the couch.

For a while, that became your new normal. 

Sometimes you both relaxed in silence, and other times, talking seemed to serve him better. Occasionally, he told you about his nightmares. Past victims. Hurting you or Steve. Falling. Hydra experiments performed on him that had gone wrong. 

Sometimes rather than talking about himself, he wanted distraction, and he asked you about your day. You often told him about whatever new things Tony had introduced to you: multi-core processors, processor chiplets, fiber optic spectrum expansions… Once you’d managed to get all the way to wavelength division multiplexing before you heard his breath even out and watched the bow of his lower lip relax, lips parted just a little. Technobabble always seemed to put him to sleep. He followed quite a bit of it, asking you questions that proved he grasped some of it, but there was always a point where you lost him and that was usually when he fell asleep. You’d like to flatter yourself and think it was that your voice was comforting, but to you it seemed more likely that your designs and discoveries were simply boring. Either way, it suited you just fine, as long as Barnes could get some rest.

And the nights you couldn’t sleep, you went out to that same spot in case he might be waiting. Oftentimes he was, or he joined you shortly after, and your head ended up in his lap instead and his fingers in your hair. Perhaps JARVIS was keeping an eye on you for Barnes too. For better or worse, your troubled nights were few and far between at least.

“You know, Tony had these newfangled things called _bedrooms_ installed. Not sure if either of you encountered them back in the Stone Age, but they’re pretty cool. Good for sleeping in,” Clint informed you and Barnes out of the blue one evening, when you were both stretched out on one of the couches in the main seating area.

You and Barnes both looked up from your phones and at each other in bewilderment. 

“I’m just saying, you could, like, _share_ one of those at night when you’re trying to sleep, instead of doing your whatever you’re doing now. Tony’s couches aren’t bad but they ain’t beds.” 

“You worried about us getting cricks in our necks, Barton?” Barnes’s tone was incredulous rather than biting. 

“Well, I’m getting annoyed at having to sneak around in the middle of the night when I’m headed for the kitchen.”

“That’s you sneaking around?”

“It sure as hell isn’t Bruce. And I’m not about to let your weird couchsurfing obsession interrupt my late night PB&J ritual. I’ve been trying to keep quiet while fishing jam out of the jar and it’s just a hassle. Bite the bullet and get a room already, yeah?” 

As Clint turned to walk away, wiggling his fingers in a dismissive wave, you blinked in surprise. You and Barnes had shared rooms before, every night while you were on the run in fact. Finding space at all had been a challenge, so sharing was just assumed. When you’d woken after your rescue, Pepper had shown your own room and you’d accepted it without much of a thought. Running and hiding in the eighties had been recent for you but not for Barnes, and when he hadn’t mentioned it, you hadn’t either. 

You turned to look over at Barnes. He raised his eyebrows at you, you nodded, and he grinned before getting back to the article he was reading on his phone. That was that. 

Later that evening, Barnes had started the tradition of tapping out a quick “U” or “M-E” on your arm and then waiting for a nod for confirmation to determine whose room you’d be sleeping in that night, and you cheerfully kept it up. There was something about your nonverbal conversation, the way you’d both learned to read each other, that reinforced the bond you both shared and made you feel like you could take on the world together.

Your new sleeping arrangement of sharing whichever bed you ended up in suited you both just fine: Barnes slept through the night more often with you readily at hand, and your nights were easier as well. Nightmares weren’t your greatest worry anyway. 

As you settled in, everyone left you to your own devices more and more often. You were getting the hang of things, or so you thought. Despite everything having changed for you though, something in your mind didn’t always remember that things were different. To have Hydra finally behind you, to finally be safe, didn’t feel real; unfortunately your brain sometimes took that a little too literally. 

The first time it happened, you were in Tony’s lab, pencil doodling away on a sketchpad. Tony always scoffed at your penchant for writing with pencil when he was busy toying with holographs, but the scratch of lead on paper was so familiar and comforting to you that it was hard to give up. 

It was a rather complicated drawing, an attempt to add one or several processors to Barnes’s arm if you could make them work. The neural interface worked fine, but you wanted to see if you could find a way for the arm to move or adjust just a fraction faster, anticipate what he needed before his brain gave the order. Shift the power balance and arm plates alongside a mental discharge of power, instead of just after. It was all a bit new, especially when you could have several processor cores working in tandem rather than parallel, so you became absorbed in your work for hours. 

Slowly, imperceptibly, your vision tunneled, perspective stretched thin until your drawing was your only focus, everything else blurring and slipping out of sight. You worked. You wrote. Pencil scratch on paper. Calculations in the margins. Dutifully labeled variables. All work was shown. No assumptions. Time passed but that didn’t matter. The work did.

The schematic was completed, and you placed it and your pencil down on the surface in front of you. No other drawings awaited your review. 

You sat, eyes downcast. Task finished. Waiting for further instructions.

Someone else was in the room. You were used to being ignored by others who worked around you; you ignored him right back. He spoke--a question, judging by the rising inflection--but for some reason, he wasn’t speaking Russian or German so whatever he was saying must not be meant for you. 

Just another scientist talking to himself. 

You disregarded his muttering. The hum of the overhead lighting vibrated in your mind, blocking out everything else.

Waited for further instructions. 

Your eyes bored into the schematic. Time passed. You waited. 

Someone else stood next to you, gently curled fingers around your arm. Must be a guard to lead you back to your cell. 

You stood and dutifully followed. 

The hallways were different. You didn’t care to look around; it wasn’t worth the effort. Just another bunker.

You were led to a tall chair next to a counter. You distantly noted the difference; this wasn’t your cell. But once you sat, you saw the metal arm in front of you. That you recognized. 

Maintenance. Maintenance must be your next task then. You didn’t have your tools with you but you could start without them. Reaching out, you pulled the mechanical arm toward you, turning the palm upward. As always you started at the wrist, checking the flex--

Something brushed your cheek and you stopped. Your narrow focus stood still in freeze frame as you tried to understand what--who--no one ever touched--why would--

Barnes. Barnes was in front of you. You’d known he was there, it was his arm you were working on after all, but you hadn’t looked, hadn’t thought he was awake or aware--

His right hand was on your cheek. He pulled your face upward to align with his. Your focus was--it was hard to see what was in front of you--it took a moment, drawn out through several heartbeats. Barnes’s face was in front of yours. You couldn’t see the whole of it at once, it was too difficult, so you tried to concentrate on at least part of it.

His lips were moving. 

His lips were forming words. 

Your name. He was saying your name.

He remembered you?

The warmth on your cheek was… there was something about it. It sunk into your skin, made you shiver. It felt out of place. It felt _real._

Suddenly his hand was the only real thing in the world, and the edges of your vision seemed to crumble.

You were breathing. You had to be, you were alive, but that fact was suddenly brought to the forefront of your mind, and now that you had noticed, you stopped doing it automatically. You hesitated, waited for your lungs to expand on their own, but they didn’t, they weren’t working, you had to _make_ them work. 

So you inhaled. Your lungs took in less air than you’d hoped, so you exhaled and tried again. 

The second attempt was better. You sucked the air in. Forced the air out. Breathing. 

His hand was still there. On your cheek. 

You were breathing and looking at Barnes and the hum of his voice was just out of reach, if you could just--

Your hands rose nearly of their own accord, which was lucky because you were still concentrating on breathing. They came to rest on his shoulders, your fingertips nearly itching when the sensation of touching something solid overwhelmed your nerves. You squeezed your eyes shut, not trusting the vague detached perspective of your sight. You focused on your hands instead. 

Here. Warm. Solid. 

Your hands inadvertently tensed, and suddenly you wanted nothing more than for reality to get back into your head from wherever it had gone. You moved closer, pulled, wanting it to join you--

Your legs, they didn’t follow, you pitched forward from your perch on the chair--

The hand left your cheek but the sensation was replaced by pressure around your chest. Arms wound around you, caught you, held you and you held on

floating and surrounded by sensations, _real_ sensations

(remember to breathe)

Lungs expanded abruptly and pressed outward against the arms that held. Cataloged the sensory information greedily, held onto it. Arms circled. Cheek against his (scratchy) neck. Hands gripping his shoulders.

(remember to breathe)

Hands on your back, fingers spread wide. Feet dangling above the ground. 

Your mouth was dry. You swallowed. You licked your lips. You inhaled again. 

You. You existed. This was you, and this was Barnes, and this was the tower that belonged to Tony and this was the future where you were _free_. 

The detachment didn’t leave all at once. The present pressed in around you from all sides, your eyes going wide at the the sheer pressure of it, throat tightening. 

(remember to breathe)

You tried to shake off the ugly, terrifying feeling. This _wasn’t_ a dream, dammit. You were free and this was real. It was like coming out of cryostasis all over again: the world had shifted and changed around you, leaving you behind to catch up. Barnes was holding you. He caught you. You knew yourself and you knew him and you knew where and when you were. 

You needed to thank him. 

Just… in a minute. When reality wasn’t so starkly mad that it took your breath away. 

Medical professionals were brought in to speak with you. You were told that it was a dissociative episode, not uncommon for those suffering from trauma. You were given articles to read with suggestions on how to deal with dissociation, and a therapist’s phone number to call whenever you liked. What you took away from it all was that this was just… something that might happen, sometimes. You told the other Avengers about it in passing, just to let them know to excuse you if you mentally checked out for a while. You’d already apologized to Barnes enough times, even though he insisted that you had nothing to apologize for; you didn’t want to bother anyone else.

You had assumed that this would be something you would learn to deal with on your own, and you planned to. You didn’t expect for nearly everyone you’d met in the tower to be ready to tackle your problems along with you. 

The next time you set food in Tony’s lab was like any other, at first. You settled in, pencil and drawings and displays at hand, and shortly after, Tony had wandered in and chucked a bottle of juice at your head.

Thankfully, you caught it. 

“So if I’m understanding what you told me, it sounds like you need someone to annoy you every once in a while to keep from heading down the rabbit hole,” he said, skipping over any attempt at a greeting as always. “It’s a good thing you’re here of all places, ‘cause when it comes to annoying people? One of the best, right here, or so I'm told. Be ready for some curveballs, Otter Pop.” 

So Tony quizzed you, tossed you questions and hypotheticals and insults and strange pop culture references you didn’t get at random, and sometimes tossed you actual physical items that you didn’t always catch. Though occasionally you were irritated by the interruptions, he kept you tuned into the present. It was better than the disconnected hell that had removed you from reality, so you tried to take every single poke in stride.

Tony wasn’t your only savior, either. At first, it felt kind of demoralizing, to have a tell when your brain was collapsing in on itself, and to be under scrutiny of those around you. Surprisingly though, those feelings faded quickly. It made all the difference when people watched out for you not out of obligation, but because they cared. 

Steve would ask if you wanted to step outside, and wordlessly offer an arm out to you in case your perception had already shifted enough to upset your balance. Rain or shine, day or evening, he’d take you out on one of the balconies that overlooked the city and let the fresh air shock you back to reality. 

The first time he’d done it, you’d thanked him once your words sifted into order in your head. You told him how you’d lived in closed off bunkers so long that an honest to goodness gust of wind was foreign to you. Now though, it helped remind you what and when was real. Couldn’t fake that with air conditioning.

He’d nodded and shared a bit about his life before becoming Captain America, the smaller self he’d been with dodgy lungs and a weak immune system. Sometimes the days that he'd spent in his bed with one illness or another dragged on and one and on and he lost track of time, and even just getting out on the fire escape helped him ground himself. “This is a bit more fancy than that little wrought iron shelf,” he said with a quiet smile and a pat on the metal and glass railing, “but I thought it could serve the same purpose, do you some good too.”

It did.

Sam had taken to stocking the kitchen with an assortment of tea blends, just for you. There’d be times when you were hanging out in a group with the others in one of the seating areas or kitchen, and everything would seem to shrink away slowly and the sound of their voices would blend together into a pleasant but unintelligible din, and Sam would get up and turn on the kettle. In the blink of an eye, he’d hand you a mug with hot tea, the heat from the ceramic firing off nerves in your hands and pulling you back. 

“What do you think this one’s got in it?” he’d ask you. “The box says ‘double spice chai’ but hell if I know what spice they’re doubling.”

You would always oblige him and sniff the tea, seeing what ingredients you could pick out. Trying to process and pick apart a scent alone was often enough to fire a spark in your mind and keep you present. That was his way of bringing you back into the moment without firing off questions in front of everyone, and you even got a tasty beverage out of it. 

And Barnes, of course, knew you better than any of the others, and often pulled you out of disconnecting before you’d even realized you’d slipped into that space in your mind. His metal hand identified him even when your sight was focused inward, and his flesh hand grounded you. Touch had been so important when you’d first escaped, and now it helped you again more than ever. Truth be told though, him saying your name helped too. So maybe it wasn’t just touch. Maybe it was just him.

You’d apologized over and over to him, not just for the first horrible dissociative episode you’d had but for any time he’d had to pull you back after. He’d looked at you with an incredulous look and scoff. “You do the same for me whenever I can't sleep, don’t you? So you have nightmares during the day. I'm the last person in the world who'd judge you.” He’d laced your fingers together and shot you a grin before softly pressing his forehead to yours. “I got you.” 

Natasha even had a hand in keeping an eye out for you. She’d pass by and slip a little question your way, sounding like she was musing about something ridiculous but you knew the intent was to get you to focus on working something out in your head instead of your attention slipping away. You didn’t mind, and you weren’t about to call her out for helping you. 

She’d ask you how much wattage you thought the entirety of Avengers Tower pulled, or how much power it would take Barnes’s arm to overcome Captain America’s shield. When you produced answers to her questions, it never got more than a mildly amused hum out of her, but you’d both trade small smiles and she’d slip out of the room. 

Once she’d asked you, “If you had to escape the tower, right this second, how would you do it?”

That question had taken you by surprise, and your first thought brought you back to breaking out of the Russian Hydra base with Barnes. Thankfully, the conundrums you’d faced then paled in comparison to the sheer amount of technology brimming in the tower, so the thought process wasn’t even remotely similar.

“JARVIS would be my biggest worry,” you began, looking around the open air seating room with a new eye. “I don’t know if I could disable him, or even if I could, he’d probably be able to tip off someone to what I was doing before I could finish. Blowing breakers wouldn’t mean anything if he could alert anyone and everyone that I was on my way out.” You gave a little laugh. “My best bet would probably smuggling myself out on the quinjet the next time someone took it out on the mission.”

Natasha had nodded along, though she didn’t seemed entirely satisfied with your conclusion. With her skillset, no doubt she could do a much better job than you. So you’d asked her, “How would you do it?”

She’d turned to you with an even look, eyes boring into yours. “I’d walk out the front door.” She’d raised her eyebrows before giving you a small, enigmatic smile and walking away, leaving you wondering.

“What’s on your mind?” It wasn’t until you’d heard Barnes’s voice speak behind you that you realized that you’d been staring blankly into the fridge with the door held open for who knew how long. You shut it and turned around. 

His expression was carefully neutral, blue eyes boring into yours. This wasn’t a dissociative episode, just thoughts buzzing around in your brain to the point of distraction, so you blurted out exactly what was on your mind. “I don’t know if I can settle here. I’ve still got this anxious feeling, like I need to run.”

“Then we run.”

You blinked. You hadn’t expected him to readily agree like that right off the bat. “Just like that?”

His lips pulled into a grin and he gave a little shrug. “Didn’t break free from Hydra just to hole up in some other compound forever. Got a whole world to see after all, don’t we?” 

He made it sound so easy, but in the end, wasn’t it? Tony had said it himself: stay as long as you like, leave when you like. Just like that. That’s what freedom was, wasn’t it? And you were free, weren’t you?

Your head bobbed, a smile blooming on your lips. He’d said ‘we.’ You liked the sound of that. “I hear rationing’s over. Think I can get you to let me go pick up some food for us for once?”

He held his hand out to you, and you took it without hesitation. Your smile fueled his, grin growing wider, and he tugged you to him. His face moved close to yours, his nose in you hair, and you felt a soft press of his lips to your temple before he moved toward your rooms and pulled you along with him. “Right then. First stop on our adventure’s gonna be a grocery store.” 

You didn’t have much to pack besides a bit of clothing, your new ID, a sketchpad and pencil, and a charger for your Stark phone. Tony had hoisted off so many prototypes and samples on you, but most weren’t particularly portable so you left them behind. Still, though your things fit in a single backpack, they were _your_ things, now. Every Hydra base transfer, every cryofreeze cycle, every hurried escape from one city to another, you’d had nothing that belonged to you that you could call your own and bring with you. And now, you did. It was a start.

Leaving the tower still felt a bit like escaping; the only person you’d both told was Steve just before you departed. He’d looked conflicted for a moment but that was quickly replaced by a warm, encouraging smile. He held his arms out to you and you leaned forward into his hug as he murmured for you both to “go have fun.”

When Steve had finished hugging you, he had one for his best friend, too. “Take care, Buck. You know where to find me if you ever need me.”

“Don’t worry, punk. I’ll see you again.”

You and Barnes shared a private smile and headed out on your adventure, together and well and truly free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Friendly reminder to not bottle up dissociative episodes, please seek help even more than this reader does! Friends are amazing but medical help is super important too <3 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!!


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